I don't reload so I have been buying commercial made ammo. What happened to these unfired bullets? Did someone goof up on the crimp? I fired 3 a week ago before noticing the shape of them. I saved the brass and after firing its not hour glass shaped. When I got home I checked these 2 unshot using calipers from my shop. The unshot brass was 0.4715 in the middle. Sorry for the bad picture, I need a new lens cover for my phone.. I compared these to Hornady Black and 2 other brands.

Attachments

ammohourglass275.jpg (51.42 KiB) Viewed 1478 times

Last edited by Robert FL on Sat Feb 10, 2018 6:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hoot wrote:For every one of those that you find, you should seriously be hitting Hornady up for a new box of ammo! -or would they prefer that you spread those pictures around the web?

Hoot

Not trying to start trouble, just thought it was weird..Again Not Hornady ammo..So was this a bad crimping accident?

I don't see how any kind of crimping mishap could've caused that. The only possibility was that vendor tried doing a "TightNeck" process. I linked to that experiment not too long ago in another thread. It's a way of getting more neck tension without some exotic crimp. Not sure what to make of that. I'm no chicken little but if I had gotten them from a 2nd source vendor, I would have set them right back. They're too outside the 9 dots for me and I've tried some strange stuff over the years!

Hoot

In Theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In Practice, there is.

I purchased some 275 XTP rounds from Black Butterfly Ammo. I’m a fan of Barnes bullets for hunting and I don’t reload (yet). The rounds I received looked exactly like your picture. Shot really well out of my Ruger American with 22” stainless barrel.

Like all of our .450 Bushmaster loads this round employs a heavy dual crimp for use in AR platforms. In addition, this round has been resized with a special custom die to increase the neck tension for use with this particular projectile which ranges in sizes of .451+/-. This neck tension further increases the accuracy and performance. This also helps to reduce the bullet jump 450 Bushmaster taper crimps are known for when cycled in ARs.

I bought a box of Black Butterfly 250 grain Tomahawks, but they don't seem to have the same shape. The BB 275 Barnes do shoot nicely in my gun, I only got 5 but the 3 I did shoot were right with the Hornady 250s at 100 yards. My gun did not like the tomahawks.

I case you can't find the thread, here's the TightNeck experiment, from back in 2012. While my effort was not as extreme as the ones pictured in this thread, the concept is sound except for two issues. Brass is not hardened by heating and quenching like steel is. It is hardened by working it. IE stretching and shrinking the wall thickness. It increases the brittleness of the brass. For reloaders, that usually happens after multiple reloadings over time with normal resizing, eventually requiring the reloader to anneal the brass. The other issue is when you squeeze the diameter down, the cases gets longer and you would have to trim them back after the extreme resizing to make the SAAMI spec length. Once fired and they expand to normal diameter, they will be shorter than SAAMI spec, even after resizing them to normal 450b diameter. Some members here buy commercial ammunition and sell their brass to reloaders to offset the cost. As a reloader, I would be cautious about buying those TightNeck cases from someone sight unseen. You may find that once you resize them to normal 450b SAAMI dimensions, that they are too short to make spec.

I totally get this vendor's approach but I don't understand why they extreme sized them so far down the case. As my original experiment in the link above mentions, you only need to squeeze the case down as far as the seating depth of the bullet, to realize the benefit. My hat's off to the vendor for being able to mass produce these though. Getting a non-boat tail bullet to start down those narrow for caliber necks is really tricky, even with the superior Hornady seating die, with its bullet aligner sleeve.

Hoot

In Theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In Practice, there is.